Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 11

Noise exploded in his ears—whoops, cackles, clapping, the sound of chairs scraping the floor as one friend after another entered the fray of bear hugs and backslaps.
When the chaos subsided, Bob stepped forward and spoke to those still seated.  “Ladies and gentlemen—those of you who don’t know our newly arrived guest—may I present to you my cousin Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis to his friends. And to the lads in this room who know him best, the Great Exhilarator!”

“Hurrah!” they shouted. “Exhilarate us, Lou!”

Someone passed a glass to Louis.  “To guid-fallowship,” he said, lifting his voice along with the wine, “to guid health, and the wale o’ guid fortune to yer bonny sels!”
He threw back his head and let go a giddy laugh when the wine hit his tongue. Pure gladness coated his mouth, slid down through his chest, lit up his arms and legs. My God, how joyful a picture the dining room made. It looked as warm as a Flemish painting, all golden and peopled by dear friends and ragged, lovely strangers. They smoked pipes and cigarettes, a company of exiles with paint-speckled forearms that united them into a band and declared their intentions.

Will Low,  the  sweet-tempered American  painter  Louis had met  the  previous summer, gestured to the end of the table where he was chatting with a young boy, the only child in the room.

“What took you so long?” The boy looked up at him through pale lashes. “Everybody’s been waiting.”

Louis crouched down near his chair. “And what might your name be?” “Sam,” he said. “Sammy. But these people call me Petti?sh.” His shoulders went up in a
question. “I don’t know why.”

Louis laughed. “Is it short for petite ?sh? I’ll wager it is. You know, my father had a name like that for me—called me Smout. It’s a Scottish word for a small fry.”
“Why do grown-ups always name us after fish?”

“Ah, that is a good question. I haven’t the faintest idea. But I’ll tell you how I ended it. Charged him a penny every time he said the wretched word. You might consider that.”
“Sam’s here with his sister, Belle,” Will explained, nodding toward the pretty, dark-haired girl next to Baxter. “And at the end of the table,” he continued, “that lovely lady … “

“… is my mother,” the boy said.

Louis stood up to have a better view. “You don’t say. I thought they were sisters.” The child rolled his eyes. “Everyone says that.”

So these are the Americans. Could they possibly know the displeasure they had caused his circle  of  friends,  sight  unseen?  When  Bob  got  word  from  Madame  Chevillon  that  an American woman and her children had taken up residence at the inn for the summer, he had fumed with indignation. The only reason the fellows were assembling at Grez in the ?rst place was because they had been driven out of their last summer haunt by a swarm of lady painters. The bourgeois art students from the school in Barbizon had ?lled the inns and cafés and turned up behind every other tree with an easel and paintbrush.
News of  the American  woman  and her brats had landed like a  lead weight on  their collective fantasies. So much for a summer of la vie bohème on the banks of the Loing. Bob was so irritated by Madame Chevillon’s announcement that he’d come to Grez before the others, intent upon behaving badly enough to chase away the intruders. He was the right man for the job; he had a slicing wit when he chose to unsheath it.

While Louis was out paddling the Arethusa from Antwerp to Paris, Bob had sent him two letters in care of Will Low’s studio in Paris. Louis collected both right before he came to Grez. In the ?rst letter, Bob’s rage was palpable. By the second letter, though, his indignant tone had disappeared. They’re all right, he’d written.

“Come with me.” Bob had Louis’s arm now and led him directly to the lady interloper. “Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne,” she said when she stood. The crown of dark brown curls
at the top of her head came up ?rst (how tiny she was, nearly a foot shorter than he), and then  the smooth  honey-colored face tilted. He examined the curving  upper lip—like an archer’s bow—and the deep brown eyes. “I feel as if I know you,” she said, grasping both of his hands. Everything about her was exotic, from her lively gold-ringed ?ngers to her tiny blue kidskin slippers peeking from beneath a black skirt. She might have been a Sephardic shepherdess, to judge from her features, but the voice was di?erent. American, to be sure. It had a touch of grassy prairie in it, riverboats, he didn’t know what all. Maybe Tennessee walking horses.

Louis grinned. “May I ask where you are from?”

“Originally? Why, I grew up in Indiana.” The dark eyes, full of sex, danced ?rst toward Bob  and  then  Louis. “Your  cousin  tells  me  you’re  from  Edinburgh.  He  also  says

you’re … What’s the expression? All right,” she said.

Louis  was  momentarily  at  a  loss  for  words.  Those  were  the  words  Bob  had  used  to describe her in his last letter. Had Bob told her how they had all dreaded her? Louis felt strangely out of step for a moment, as if understandings had been reached in his absence.
“I’ll get some food for you,” Bob said, and disappeared.

“Have you been to America?” Fanny asked Louis.

“No, I regret to say I haven’t. But when I was in Cumberland some years ago, I met a Highland spae wife who predicted I would go—”

“A spae wife?”

“Oh, a mad old crone who claimed she had second sight.” “Be careful what you say,” Fanny said. “I have a touch of it myself.” Louis laughed.  “She was nothing like you, but I liked her predictions. She said I would
visit America and I was to be very happy and I would spend much time on the sea.”
“You  don’t  say.”  Fanny  Osbourne  turned  her  attention  to  a  pear-shaped  mesh  bag suspended from a link of the silver chatelaine around her waist. She unhooked it and pulled out a small sack of tobacco. “Cigarette?” She peeled six papers from a booklet and put them on the table.

“Absolutely. I’m not accustomed to a lady rolling her own.”

Louis watched her boyish ?ngers shake a line of tobacco onto a paper. She rolled the cigarette evenly with both thumbs, then lifted it to her mouth, where her cat-quick tongue sealed the edge. Six times a stu?ed rolling paper went to her lips; each repetition was more expert than the last. “That should do us,” she said, reattaching the little purse to her belt.
He  noticed several  objects  hanging  from  other  ?ne  chains  on  her  waist,  including  a folding knife and a pouch full of drawing pencils.

“You are the very spectacle of self-sufficiency,” Louis said.

When Fanny raised her eyes to his, he caught his breath. She focused her gaze on him as if sighting a pistol. “Are you mocking me?” she asked.

“No, no, not at all! I’m admiring you. Have you always rolled your own cigarettes?” “Ever since I started smoking. A miner in Nevada taught me.”

“In Nevada?”

“I lived for a while in a silver mining camp.” “My goodness! How … bracing.”

She  drew  on  her  cigarette. “That’s  a  delicate  expression,  Mr.  Stevenson.”  Her  eyes
remained unwaveringly on his.


“I meant you seem so ladylike, and to be such an adventuress—”

“Oh, it’s not that unusual to ?nd women in mining camps. But I wasn’t in the same line of business some of the others pursued, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Louis shook his head. “I am wondering why you take whatever I say and misconstrue it, madam. You have known me ?ve minutes, not nearly long enough to despise me. It usually takes at least ten.”

She laughed then and small, perfect white teeth ?ashed across her face. “I’m only teasing you, Louis.” Lou-us, she pronounced his name, soft and slow, as if stroking it. “I liked you the minute you jumped in.”

Bob returned with a plate of food for him and a bottle of whisky. “To Louis the Canoeist,” he said, tapping his glass to his cousin’s. “Give us the plums, Lou.”

There had been an abundance of plums to pick from along the banks of the Scheldt and the canals of Belgium and then, at the end, the upper Oise. Louis had traveled for twenty days  in  the Arethusa with his shy, athletic friend Walter Simpson, who manned another sailing canoe, the Cigarette. Their voyage had provoked furious notetaking on Louis’s part— from observations on the free life of the barge captain to his own near-kidnapping by the mad young oarsmen of the Belgian Royal Nautical Sportsmen’s Club, whose enthusiasm for boating was almost frightening. For the sake of a warm clubhouse dinner and a bed for the night,  he  and  Simpson  pretended  to  know  the  great  English  rowers  whose  names  the Belgians reverently recited. As they were escorted to their sleeping quarters by one of the club members, Louis and Simpson, under pressure, agreed to give a morning demonstration of the proper English stroke. At dawn, they fled rather than be found out as rank amateurs. There was so much Louis had saved up to tell Bob, but how could he say it now, in front of this new woman? He wanted to say, If you want to ?nd out who you really are, then go travel. To move is the thing. He wanted to say, Something important has begun. Every chance encounter, every change of landscape in the journey, o?ered itself up to his pen. He could see a way now to go out and have adventures, to pour all that he witnessed through his soul and onto paper, a way he could make a living doing what he loved, in spite of his father’s plans for him. At the end of the journey, after he had maneuvered the Arethusa to a dock in Pontoise, it was raining. He hated wet weather. Yet he had put his face up to the

drizzle and thanked it for falling on him.

Louis looked at Bob and Fanny’s expectant faces. “French rain is di?erent from the stu? that falls in Auld Reekie.”

Bob laughed, but Fanny said,  “It takes leaving, doesn’t it, to see things through fresh eyes.”

“It does,” Louis said. He saw she had two or three wavy silver strands, like sprung coils, at each temple. “I felt free, truly free. Just to be out in the open air …”
“Do you know that Whitman poem  ‘Song of the Open Road’?” Fanny asked.  “‘I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air … ‘“

“… I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like,’” Louis responded, picking up the verse, “… and whoever beholds me shall like me.’”

He saw the faintest smile flicker across her somber mouth as she took his measure. “So, you’re a  travel essayist now, are you?” Bob injected into the quiet moment that
followed. He sucked hard on his pipe and released a cloud above their heads. The sardonic grin he had developed at Cambridge was in full display.  “Your father will be thrilled to hear that.” He turned to Fanny. “Our friend here just completed his legal studies.”
“I am not suited to be an advocate,” Louis said, suddenly cross.

“You’re not much of a vagabond, either,” Bob observed. “Look at you with a knapsack. No self-respecting gypsy carries a freshly pressed shirt.”

“When  we  were  younger,  perhaps sixteen,” Louis explained to  Fanny,  “we  would go adventuring for a couple of days without anything but a toothbrush. Not even a comb. Considered it bad form to be encumbered.”

“We couldn’t stand ourselves after a while,” Bob added, “so we’d have to go buy shirts and  underwear  and  visit  a  barber  rather  often,  just  to  get  the  hair  combed.  It  got expensive.”

“Our fathers were underwriting our adventures in those days,” Louis said. “Let’s be honest, they still are.” Bob swilled back a whisky. “So you were close as little boys,” Fanny said. “Like brothers,” Bob said.

“But I want to know about you, Fanny Osbourne. How did you decide to come to Grez?” She ?icked her wrist, and the vivacious face went slack. “There’s plenty of time for that.
How long are you staying?”

“I have to go back to Edinburgh in a few days.”

“We can talk tomorrow,” she said. “I must put my boy to bed. He’s looking weary down there.” Louis watched her collect the limp child from his seat and depart the room.
“She’s quite something, isn’t she?” Bob said when she was gone.  “The locals call her la belle Americaine.”

“Indeed. What is she doing in Grez?” “Ordered here by a doctor.” “Lungs?”

“No,  it’s not that.  She came over to the continent to study  painting,  along  with  her daughter and sons. While they were in Paris, the youngest boy died of consumption—the kind Henley had.”

“Ah,” Louis said. “What a pity.”

“She broke down, and they sent her here to rest.” “Where is the husband?”

“Back in California.” “And …?”

“Rather  raw,  from what  I  can  gather.  Fanny  doesn’t  say  much  about  him.  I  get  the feeling it went cold a long time ago.”

“Did you tell her we all dreaded her presence here?” “I did just recently. She found it quite funny.”

So they are con?dants, Louis thought, probably lovers. And once again, here am I, ?oating around in Bob’s wake.

He poured himself a glass of whisky, drank it down, and then threw back a second. “A guid dram, laddie,” Louis growled playfully. But his heart stung. He waited for the burning to pass before pulling himself up to go talk to the others.